Episode 26: Facing Challenges

The Panic Pod

We’ve been posting our Instagram prompts for the end-of-year hashtag #itsjustanxiety to the Panic Pod Community since the 21st of December. Please go on and share your own answer to your instagram story for other listeners to read. Let’s help each other and share the knowledge we’ve gained about anxiety. 💪

Going into 2021, the world is going to look and feel a lot different. Even when we are aware of challenging nature of what we face, anxious feelings arise. When we haven’t done something that is moderately fearful for a long time, those anxious feelings can be even more escalated. We ask ourselves, “How do I prepare?” Anxiety’s whole purpose is to make you doubt - especially anticipatory anxiety, which is the particular anxiety that comes from knowing that a challenge is in our near future and doing what we can to prepare for it. When it’s been studied, anticipatory anxiety has been found to derive from a different place in the brain than performance anxiety. Many people remark after-the-fact that the anticipatory anxiety they felt before an event was worse (or made worse) than the anxiety that they felt in the act of doing something challenging (delivering a speech, during a performance review, traveling on an airplane, etc.) This is because anticipatory anxiety can still trigger a threat response: palms get sweaty, we disassociate, we can’t sleep, and we keep thinking about the threat. The primal parts of our brains haven’t grown in tandem with the rest of our brain. Therefore, judgement, disapproving looks, failure, or even the idea of a panic attack cause our bodies to respond as though the threat was as real as a lion. Defining what we are threatened by can help us not to feel so much anticipatory fear.

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